We Need a Better NAFTA

The new NAFTA is another corporate handout. It won't stem the outsourcing of good jobs or protect the rights of working people. Tell Congress the new NAFTA isn't good enough and to refuse to vote on it.

At an industry conference for video game developers in late March, the thousands of lanyarded attendees could try new games, swap business cards and hear from experts on rendering realistic blood spatter.

Or they could talk about unionizing.

Hundreds joined a series of standing-room-only roundtables on the topic of organized labor, taking time away from the Game Developers Conference to brainstorm ways to build worker power in an industry that is almost entirely nonunion.

Taxpayers are scrambling to make last-minute payments due to the Internal Revenue Service in just four days, but many of the country’s largest publicly-held corporations are doing better: They’ve reported they owe absolutely nothing on the billions of dollars in profits they earned last year.

In 2018, women once again came home with over 16% less money in their paychecks. Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, which means women had to work until April 2—92 days longer—to be paid the same amount as a comparable man in 2018.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Tuesday that President Trump must reopen talks with Canada andMexicoto tighten enforcement provisions in a proposed North American trade deal, casting renewed doubt on prospects for congressional ratification of the accord.

“I’m not anti-union, but I don’t really think we need them, right?” said Double Fine head Tim Schafer while hostingyesterday evening’s Game Developers Choice Awardsin San Francisco. “We’re all great here and in this show. No one here is union and...” Then the stage lights went out.

“Oh, right,” said Schafer after the lights went out. “Except for the lighting crew. I forgot they’re all union.”

A four-year fight to expand overtime pay to millions of workers may soon be over. About 1.2 million workers will win and 2.8 million will lose.

The Department of Labor is scaling back an Obama-era rule that would have doubled the maximum salary for a worker to qualify for overtime pay, accordingto a proposed rulethe agency sent to the Office of the Federal Register for public review.

In speeches and in press releases over the last year, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has pointed out that unions are uniquely qualified by their very nature to lead the country out of what he has called a “dark period,” a time when hateful speech and vitriol emanate from the White House and are found in abundance everywhere else. Unions, he notes, bring together all kinds of people in a fight that is common to the vast majority, a fight for a better life for oneself and for the next generation.